Alex London and Katherine Locke Discuss Keeping Magic in the Family

London: I think Ilse and Kylee are pretty similar, in their deep, searching intelligence and their intense stubbornness, so yeah…sparks might fly. Kylee is far more resistant to her own power in Black Wings Beating than Ilse is in Spy With the Red Balloon, though. In that way their journeys are very different. Kylee has to embrace a kind of magic she’s afraid of, while Ilse is itching to use hers from page one. Maybe that says as much about our different personalities as it does about theirs?
Locke: Maybe! Although I don’t think I see you as a writer resistant to his power. I think I’m maybe more impulsive of the two of us, but Ilse has much better task completion skills than I do. I also think Ilse might just talk too much for Kylee. Kylee and Stella (one of Spy’s secondary characters) would get along well, I think. Now I kind of want to write crossover fanfiction, not going to lie.
Ilse believes she can protect them both and uplift them both through the power. At least for Ilse, exposing their powers puts her brother in tremendous danger and that’s guilt she carries with her for a long time. At least in my view, I felt like Kylee was resistant in part because she saw her resistance as an act of protection for her brother. Their powers both seem intrinsically connected to how they relate to their brothers first, even before they relate to the world. Do you feel like that’s true? Or did you have a different approach to Kylee?
London: That’s exactly it. All she has ever seen of birds of prey and those who seek to command them is violence and suffering. She doesn’t want that for her brother and thinks by holding back her power, she can protect him from what she believes her power will do. She assumes she can’t control it; she’ll have to learn how.
Locke: I am obsessed with the world you built in Black Wings Beating. I can’t tell where real life influence and fantasy begin and end—it’s seamless. How much research did you do? How did you decide what would influence this world and what you’d pull from your imagination? (Are ghost eagles real?!)
London: I did a ton of research. I love research. I read and read and read about birds of prey, and I did my share of bird watching. Luckily, there is a Sharp-shinned Hawk who hangs out in my backyard sometimes, so he was helpful for more than just keeping rabbits out of the yard. I also a spent a little time with Master Falconer Mike Dupuy in rural Pennsylvania, learning about the art and craft of falconry, got to meet some of his raptors, and even got to call his Cooper’s Hawk, JJ, to my fist and toss him back to the sky a few times. That is one hell of a feeling. There are real tethers to leash the hawk to the glove, but the moment you unclip them, the tether is an invisible longing that ties the bird to you and you to the bird, a mix of training, appetite and hope. And, as the master falconer pointed out to me, those tethers can break anytime. Loss is always a present possibility in a falconer’s life. As it is in all our lives.
And thankfully, the ghost eagle is not real. Though there are myths of ancient eagles that could carry off a full sized human, none exists in our world…that we know of!

London: It’s rare in a historical speculative thriller (which are rare enough books on their own) to have so much diversity. And we tend to think of WWII as especially white and straight and male—the Saving Private Ryan lens of history—but in The Spy with the Red Balloon, you’ve got a full rainbow of humanity sharing one trait (well, two if you count magic): Fighting Nazis. I don’t really have a question on that. It just feels vital and necessary and awesome right now. Tell more about that choice!
Locke: I made that choice because it reflects the accuracy of history! Our media around history, especially around both World Wars, tends to be very white and straight. But we had queer soldiers and people of color serving in all branches of the military, and the Manhattan Project—while very white due to Jim Crow laws keeping prominent Black scientists out of the project site in Tennessee—didn’t exist in a vacuum. I really wanted to show the breadth of the people who serve, but also to show that the war didn’t just touch the lives of young white straight Christian Americans. It touched everyone’s lives.
In Black Wings Beating, you really dive into power structures, religion, and the idea of followers, at all levels. Some good, some bad, some morally gray. We get to see a society wrestling with religion built around tradition and culture, and the ways that gets warped and changes depending on a few factors—one person, a river, the other side of the mountain. What drew you to exploring these things in this book? What about Black Wings Beating made it the right book to explore those themes?
London: I didn’t start with the idea that I’d be writing about faith and power, but I’m more of a discovery writer than a planner, and as the tensions of the book developed, I realized there were complex histories at play in the world of Uztar. While it is a not a world in which power moves on the axis of race or gender or sexuality, it does move on the relationship to birds, to the sky cults, and to history. I looked for models in the 30 Years War in fact, exploring how schisms within a single belief system could lead to an intense fracturing along fault lines so many had thought were stable. Sadly, it has plenty of resonances with today’s struggles, but that was not deliberate. Fanaticism tends to be boring and to share common traits across histories and cultures. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all murderous fundamentalists are alike, but each society that defeats them, defeats them in their own way.
Locke: I love that. I want that on a T-shirt. What made you choose to eliminate race/gender/sexuality as power structures in Uztar?
London: I realized I didn’t have to import our society’s hang-ups into a fantasy world. It has its own history and culture, which gives it its own unique hang-ups! People still seek to exploit and dominate each other in Uztar, but they never invented race or sex and gender policing to do it.  That’s what I love about fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction. They all can provide models to say our world is not the only possible world, and our way of constructing power is not the only way.
So in Spy (like The Girl With The Red Balloon before it), you weave magic, science, and history in a way that feels wholly unique and also completely plausible with the history of our world. How tied were you to the rules of physics and the facts of history as you wrote the story? What impact did that have this time around (as opposed to in Girl, which had a lot less science and history that is, at least in the case of 1980s Berlin, less well known)?
Locke: I do not have a background in physics, at all. In fact, I used a loophole in my high school’s requirements for graduation to get out of my physics class in particular. In retrospect, this wasn’t a great move because I based my magic system in physics. I didn’t do a deep dive into physics, but I did think a lot about how scientists approach new science and questions (my sister is a scientist, my dad’s a doctor, and my mom has a degree in biology). For me, that type of thinking and approach toward problem-solving was even more important than the science itself. But I did try to use things like how invisibility might work, surface tension, etc when inventing magic. As for history, I bent a little more of history in Spy than I did with Girl, and that was in part because it is better known. I felt I had more flexibility with a well-known narrative than I did with an unknown narrative. But I try not to change history. That’s a line for me. I don’t write worlds where Nazis win (because, for ten million or more people, the Nazis *did* win). I want to explore the multitude of turning points and changes and individual choices that exist within the outcomes we already know. I love those stories.
I love that we both wrote sibling stories.
London: Me too! There is something in that close bond of people who grew up side by side, who’ve watched every iteration of the other person, from tantrums to teens and who share a common experience that no one else ever could. And yet, most siblings I know are quite different from each other. It’s really fascinating to explore, the bonds that endure growing up, the bonds that experience stretches, and the bonds that do, sometimes, break. Brysen and Kylee, just like Wolf and Ilse, have different relationships to magic, different desires for their world, and different needs in it, but as big as both their stories get—and both our books get big with total war, ancient magic, and tortured histories—they are still at their heart, family stories.
Locke: One of the unexpected parts of The Girl with the Red Balloon was that I knew it was a book that delved into family, but consciously I really thought that was about the relationship between Ellie and her grandfather. It was only after a reader pointed out to me that there are parallels in Girl between Kai and his sister Sabina and Benno and his sister Ruth that I ended up specifically choosing to write about siblings for Spy. Did you know going into Black Wings Beating that you wanted to do siblings? Did that evolve for you? Do you have siblings?
London: I knew from the start, before the first word was written. I wanted to explore two siblings, one of whom wanted to be great at the thing that the other was great at, maybe because I’ve been jealous of my sister’s handwriting for as long as I can remember. Or maybe because I’m afraid I’ll never measure up to the things I’ve been taught to strive for…maybe Black Wings Beating is my own psychotherapy via giant killer birds.
Locke: I’m curious: why twins?
London: There is something so powerful in the relationship of two siblings who could not possibly be closer—they shared a womb—but who, when adolescence begins, inevitably pull apart in unexpected ways. To me, it is a relationship that shows in the extreme what all young people go through as they grow and find their own ways in the world, plus, in its uniqueness is simply fascinating to explore. But I’m curious why you decided to make Ilse, who is the younger sibling, far more the caretaker of her older brother?
Locke: I think both Ilse and Wolf think that they’re the caretaker sibling! Wolf definitely thinks he needs to protect Ilse from the truth of the world—what he sees when he’s in Europe, his relationships and friendships, his tendency to swing toward melancholy and depression. And Ilse thinks that she has to be the light-hearted one, the one that keeps Wolf from thinking about the war, and then ultimately, she feels like she has to take care of him because she’s the one who gets them into the mess to begin with. And I think that’s true of a lot of sibling relationships. My brother and I are closest in age, and I think our high school experience was very similar to this. We shared some overlapping friend groups, and we’d both make sure that no one picked on the other one too much while we relentlessly harassed each other.
As I said, one of the things that drew me to writing a sister and brother story in SPY was the two side sister-brother stories in Girl (Benno & Ruth, Kai & Sabina). I found those to be really rewarding experiences to write and something I wished I’d had more space to explore. So I gave myself a whole book to do that! I’ve always been fascinated by the experience of sharing one facet of an identity with someone—either dance or Judaism or magic—and getting something completely different out of it. And I think in Black Wings Beating, that happens not just with magic and falconry, but their relationship to their communities. Do you think that’s a ripple effect of their relationship with magic and the ghost hawk, or do you think that’s all intertwined from the start?
London: In Black Wings Beating, the community, the family trauma Brysen and Kylee have experienced, their relationship to each other and to the ghost eagle are all interconnected. The magic in the world of Black Wings Beating is Language Magic, if you will, and language is a construct of personal history, cultural knowledge, invisible histories, and relationships. There is no magic in this world without their community and its history and their is no magic without their relationship to each other either. Even their trauma and their heartache make the magic possible, if they can find a way to integrate it into their personalities, to tame it…like a hawk, I guess…
Your magic, on other hand, is blood and science magic. I’m interested in that, as WWII is particularly fraught with the mixing of blood and science as a tool for oppression. Were you thinking about that as you built your magic system?
Locke: I didn’t think much about Josef Mengele (who ran horrific experiments on prisoners during the Holocaust) when I was writing, to be truthful. But I did think about what I was saying when I gave minority and marginalized characters magic. Is that empowering, or othering? Is that reinforcing stereotypes and old myths that their blood is different than white, cishet Christian blood? Have I balanced out the magic enough that it’s clear that magic is tied to blood, but randomly? But yes, in a very literal sense, I think that blood as a medium is powerful in WWII narratives. Blood, not people’s actual practice of faith, was what determined if a person was Jewish enough to be sent to a camp or ghetto, and in my books, blood gets them out.
London: I know of at least one Easter Egg in Spy. Any hints you can give?
Locke: I don’t think Wolf has a pink shirt when he’s behind enemy lines, but if he did, he’d wear it on Wednesdays. Does that work?
London: I will never stop trying to make fetch happen.
Locke: Um, I get a sneak peek at book 2 of Black Wings Beating, right? Because I need to know what’s next…
London: No sneak peaks, but I will say, that there is more heartache, more romance, and a lot more killer birds. Like…a WHOLE LOT. Battles in the sky, battles on the ground, and more emotional twists than there are birds in the sky.
Locke: Yes. Please. I’m really excited for people to fall in love with Kylee and Brysen. The world’s incredible, but seeing through their eyes is such a gift. And I don’t want to spoil the ending, but where you left Black Wings Beating off is making me really excited to see how the twins grow in the next book.
Black Wings Beating is on shelves now. The Spy with the Red Balloon releases October 2 and is available for preorder.